Every time I prepare a travel itinerary across multiple timezones via Google Calendar I'm reminded of my feeling that it was written as a front-end for a database of calendar items, not as a tool for busy people to organise their lives. It is basically impossible to input an arrangement of items that usefully and quickly illustrates where I need to be and when.
A simple example is that here I sit in Hong Kong, and my upcoming flight from San Francisco to Melbourne (which departs at 00:50 PDT) is showing as departing at 17:50 HKT, which is true but useless. That's the hallmark of a system designed with the data structures in mind first. With (too many) clicks I can change it to display in PST, but now my diary for today in Hong Kong is wrongly displayed.
To some extent this is a flaw in iCalendar's data model, but it's not insoluble, if you start with the right perspective i.e. user stories. So my general complaint is that this kind of "data first" rather than "utility first" design pervades the Google Calendar application.
(Don't even get me started on the "world clock" extension, it's just garbage).
Judging by the listing of optional extensions in the "Labs" section, Google Calendar has languished with little serious development since 2009. The main utility to me these days is that it can aggregate multiple calendars, including subscriptions to external feeds, and then pass on that aggregation to mobile clients.
So I think it's another dying Google product, one that was misconceived in the first place, and I too am interested in alternatives. However calendaring is hard and none of the alternatives I've considered to date were actually better; all limited or flawed in other showstopping ways. So Google Calendar remains the least crap of my options.
We (FastMail) have a solution to this. You can view the calendar in "floating time", in which we display every even in the event's own time zone. So you can see your Hong Kong events as they will be in Hong Kong, but your San Francisco flight will be shown at 00:50.
Hey I didn't know FM were having a go at calendaring. Can you make calendars as slick as you did webmail? I hope so! I tried it out, I think you're on the right track; I could even switch over today, despite some minor features missing (e.g. some views, split TZ start/end). I'll also say, don't be afraid to move beyond the standard paradigms to implement user stories. Calendaring has sucked for years, and reimplementing Google Calendar simply with fewer interface defects would leave a world of needs going begging.
I've used FastMail calendering for several years now, I've got to say I've never had a single issue with it, accepting links / invites from other people on gmail etc... all works perfectly and events sync and update not only quickly, but reliably. I've (been forced to) used O365 for work for years and that shows a stark contrast where events go missing, have incorrect timezones from people in not just the same timezone but same organisation, disconnection issues, many year old appointments popping up at random etc... I've never had any of that with FastMail's calendering - just the way it should be. However I know that this Ask HN is about open-source calendering and FM is a hosted solution. The biggest issue I've personally had with most of the available CalDAV web interfaces I've seen / tried is that they tend to be written in PHP and while I don't want to hate on languages and it's not that simple, PHP isn't something I want to add to my existing web-stack of Ruby and Python which while both far from perfect feel more modern to host / deploy.
A simple example is that here I sit in Hong Kong, and my upcoming flight from San Francisco to Melbourne (which departs at 00:50 PDT) is showing as departing at 17:50 HKT, which is true but useless. That's the hallmark of a system designed with the data structures in mind first. With (too many) clicks I can change it to display in PST, but now my diary for today in Hong Kong is wrongly displayed.
To some extent this is a flaw in iCalendar's data model, but it's not insoluble, if you start with the right perspective i.e. user stories. So my general complaint is that this kind of "data first" rather than "utility first" design pervades the Google Calendar application.
(Don't even get me started on the "world clock" extension, it's just garbage).
Judging by the listing of optional extensions in the "Labs" section, Google Calendar has languished with little serious development since 2009. The main utility to me these days is that it can aggregate multiple calendars, including subscriptions to external feeds, and then pass on that aggregation to mobile clients.
So I think it's another dying Google product, one that was misconceived in the first place, and I too am interested in alternatives. However calendaring is hard and none of the alternatives I've considered to date were actually better; all limited or flawed in other showstopping ways. So Google Calendar remains the least crap of my options.